Truth Social and US and China Tech Tensions

Galen Stocking of the Pew Research Center. Plus, we'll discuss the escalating technology war between the US and China as Japan joins the United States and Netherlands in restricting exports of chipmaking gear to China. And we'll get a read on the red hot race for ev dominance with Kia

Motors COO Steve Center. All that and so much more coming up, but we return to those markets, will return to some of that news around Japan joining the US the Netherlands in terms of impacting and restricting the exports of chip industry over to China, and it's impacting the socks. I'm looking that down by two point two percent at the moment. NASDAC off of its highs that we've been seeing off for one and a quarter percent. Today. We're

basically seeing risk aversion in the market today. We're worried about banks, We're worried about economic data pointing towards the US recession. We're therefore seeing a flight to safety. US government bonds doing well. We're seeing the yields down eleven basis points on the two year. Let's move it on because actually what's managed to withstand some of the turbulence

and stock market has been Bitcoin. It is off just slightly today, only by up a quarter of a percent, though over the last three trading days we're basically stopping out at twenty eight thousand DS. Some great reporting coming on the Bloomberg all about that, but I know you're going to dig into some of the microdata. Yeah, look, we kind of really risk off. There's a lot of positive headlines on the Bloomberg, but not supporting individual stocks.

Microsoft and Palentteer, for example, both firmly lower, but they've expanded their cloud partnership and that was actually boost the Palanteer in particular Premrket. It has not held onto those games, C three, AI and name we increasingly Track had its worst session ever twenty four hours ago, on Track for

its worst two day drop ever as well. Not a lot of support in that AI space, And I just put z Scaler there because as part of that risk off mode, you look at some of the worst performers on the NASDAC one hundred higher, multiple software names really getting hit. There is an emphasis right now on stocks relating two conservative social media platforms. We've been talking about this for a number of days. Digital World Acquisition, the

spack that's due to take true. Social Public is still continuing to slide down number five percent, Rumble also down six point three percent. Very short lived. Feel good around those conservative social media names, Caroline. When the news cycle around Trump started, we've given up those games and we're continuing to slide, and we are going to dig into

exactly those social media names. In a moment. Let's turn towards Donald Trump's indictment the former president, of course saying it's all political, but District Attorney Alvin Bragg says Trump engaged in a so called catch and kill scheme that is a scheme to buy and suppress negative information to

help mister Trump's chance of winning the election. This fake case was brought only to interfere with the upcoming twenty twenty four election, and it should be dropped immediately, immediately with us to wrap it all up, as well as some of those techangles, a social media perspective, mimogs, Kutti Gupta and extraordinary day. Of course, Kuti talk to us a little bit about what indeed you're seeing after the impact.

I mean, it was historical in many ways. It was historical in many ways, a potential first criminal conviction to any American president in history. It's a massive deal. Isn't going to disqualify him from president? Even if it is a criminal conviction? The answers simply no, because there are other cases that could potentially do that, things like treason, things like moving some of those classified documents from Washington

see to mar Lago. But today the conviction that we heard or is someb the arraignment that we saw yesterday. It's really interesting the way that it's really turned into kind of banter for his campaign for twenty twenty four. And that's going to be the crucial takeaway here. At what point did the legal allegations actually rally his base and social media is a really big part of that. A great example was his comments when he went back

to Marlago last evening at eight fifteen pm Eastern. He specifically called out the likes of Twitter, Meta, which is interesting because it's only recently that he's been allowed back on to those platforms Critty. Both the judge in the arraignment and the district's attorney had something to say about the influence and impact of social media and Trump's use of it. What did they say, Yeah, it's been a very careful kind of maneuvering and how this case is handled.

A mug shot, for example, was pretty typical when you do have an arraignment like this. This time around, though the mug shot did not happen for the reason of its potential use as a campaign ploy. That is something to keep in mind. The prosecutor did outright say, look, President Trump has a massive base, he has a lot of influence. Can there be some sort of court order for President Trump to not use social media when it

comes to the developments of this particular case. Now, the judge on the other hand, saying, no, we're not going to put that court order, but we are going to discourage that. Whether that or not that changes at that next hearing December fourth, is going to be the real story there. But for now, all spare and game when it comes to social media. All right, bloom Best critic Good said, thank you, Let's stick with it more on Trump and True Social and bringing Galen Stocking, a senior

computational social scientists for the Pew Research Center. Your publisher report in November about the numbers behind true Social It's use at that time, what has your read been on how the arraignment of former President Trump has driven traffic

to those more conservative social platforms. Well, we don't have any numbers on that have been updated since last year when we published this data, But what we have seen reported elsewhere Inland New York Times is that there has been increased traffic to Choose Social since the news of the indictment came out the impact of these more right leaning social media offerings that we saw all at once

sort of come to an already crowded space. Your report in October not only high delighted truth Social, but you went into bitchhoot, gab getter, parlor, rumble telegram. How prevalent it is the use of was the use back in that report of October twenty twenty two, and are they

impactful in terms of where people get their news. So six percent use any of the seven social media sites that we were looking at as of May twenty twenty two, including truth Social Truth Social was used by two percent of US adults, and this was after just three months of it actually being released to the public, so it was released the public in February of twenty and twentyo.

We conducted this survey in May of twenty twenty two, and what we found was that people actually believe that they are being in four when they use these sites. Fifty six percent of users of any of these sites say that staying informed is a major reason use them. Most of what their news, the news that they're getting there is government politics news, according to these users, and about half of them are saying that they are seeing

news there that they wouldn't seem somewhere else. So these are becoming crucial parts of the media diet for many Americans. When you say many, though, put it into context versus Facebook versus Twitter. Sure, we found two percent used to social as a source for news. That is, of course much much lower than many other platforms. Thirty one percent as of summer of two thousand and two used Facebook for news, twenty five percent used YouTube, and then Twitter, Instagram,

and TikTok. We're all in the teams. And what's interesting, ed is how important some of these mainstays, the facebooks, the twitters were for President Trump and his previous election campaigns. Yeah, that's right. I mean, Galen, Caroline and I have been tracking the reinstatement of form President Trump to platforms like Twitter and Meta. In that arrayment proceedings, the judge cited irresponsible social media posts. What is the concern, to your

mind from the judge about those posts? Well, I can't speak to anything any concerns of the judge in particular might have had. But what I can point you two is how much he's actually using these other platforms just since he's been reinstated. He was reinstated on Twitter, I think a few months ago now he has not tweeted since then. Reinstated on YouTube a couple of weeks ago, he has posted one video Facebook. He in his campaign

is using that platform. In fact, last night, when he gave his speech at Mara Lago, links to that speech were posted on true social and on Facebook and on rumbled, but not to any of those other two platforms. We don't know what he will do in the future, but it is clear that he has been using truth Social quite frequently to express his views. I guess that you know. The point Carolina and pointing out was that social media was the modus operandi by which Trump, not the only one,

but by which Trump communicated with his face. Right, He's not on Twitter or Facebook, but do you see the messaging that he's putting on true Social permeate those platforms. So when we looked in in May of twenty twenty two add these platforms, one of the things that we looked at was what is happening outside of just Donald Trump on tchoo social. We wanted to see what other kinds of accounts were saying and what they were doing,

and how they were presenting himself. So we looked at two hundred of the most followed accounts on True Social in June of twenty twenty two, and one things we looked at was their profile photos, their banners, their whole profile page, how are they presenting themselves? And we found that about half of them were outright saying that they were conservative or Republican or pro Trump. So they're projecting this air of right leaning attitude on the platform itself.

Others had projecting a religious identity, a message of patriotism. And when we connected that back to the survey, we found that people tended to say that they had found a sense of community on the site that they were using. Looking more broadly at all these sites, to the point that sixty five percent of users of any of these sites said that they had found a community of people

who shared their views on those platforms. Because True Social says it's nonpartisan, and that of course it's all about free speech. Is it what it isn't doing that? Is it non partisan? Is it allowing free speech? So it's difficult to do a full summary of everything that True Social does or doesn't do it do as you, as you mentioned say that it is a non partisan site.

There have been report of True Social banning users or banning posts that have partisan messages that are do people disagree with, But it's difficult to tell the extent to which this is happening overall. Galen, we thank you bringing us the research. Galen Stocking of the Pew rec Center. Sticking with Social media. According to estimates by similar Web, which analyzes Internet traffic, Twitter is struggling to sell users

on its new subscription product, Twitter Blue. Only one hundred and sixteen thousand people signed up for the service of two point six million people who actually visited Twitter blue sales page on the web in March. Now more than five hundred million people use Twitter on a monthly basis, Musk said, and Twitter's advertising revenue has declined by half

between October and March. He tweeted that last month. Now, Taiwan's president is in Los Angeles today meeting with a bipartisan group of US lawmakers led by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Now it's the first time a Taiwanese leader we'll meet with a House speaker in the US since the US recognized diplomatic relations with China more than four decades ago.

China said it would closely monitor the situation. Tomorrow in San Francisco, the group will have lunch with executives from Google, Microsoft, Palanteer, even Apple CEO Tim Cook. This, of course, is as trade tensions continue to ramp up between developed nations and China. Japan's just decided to join the US and Netherlands in

restricting exports of chipmaking gear to China. Will this give the allies a powerful leg up and the escalating tech war We're kind of discussed all orbiting bogs Ian King and this tip for tap keeps continuing. But how integral are some of the players in Japan and I can, for example, to China. Yeah, now, they're very important parts of the food chain. Tokyo or Electron is obviously the standout.

It's a company that's worldly similar to Applied Materials here in the US, very important machinery that you absolutely have to have if you want to make a leading edge production lines for semi conductors. But Japan also is home to a number of other companies which also do niche but very important things materials, testing, that kind of thing as well. So this is definitely a step forward in what the Biden administration has been hoping to achieve. How far a step and how big a step that's kind

of open to interpretation. The story gives a sense of how global the supply chamber semiconductors is, but we're talking about specific technology, which is hardware that manufactures the chips, not the chips themselves. I mean Yes, it is diverse. Yes it is all over the world. But there are basically five or six COMPANIESSNL in the Netherlands, three companies here, including Applied Materials, and a couple in Japan. And you need their machines, you need access to their technology. If

you don't have that, you're done. You can't be a modern semi conductor producer. How does China respond therefore? Do they have companies of their own that are able to develop technology at a similar level? Short term? Absolutely not, not even close long term. The argument from those who oppose this kind of rule is, look, we're going to push them further towards accelerating their own efforts to cut us out. Our ability to influence them on a friendly

basis is going to go away. In we've actually seen an impact on US chipmakers today as well. We've seen the socks and next down we've seen some impacts on a video for example. Is this something that we're going to see really curtailing the business models, the ongoing revenue streams for these US companies. I, it's already happened. You're

absolutely right. This is an ongoing sort of concern and ongoing cloud and describe it how you want, but this is something that people have to be conscious of, this idea of decoupling. China is the biggest market for semi conductors. It was on its way to being the biggest market for semi conductor capital equipment. If you are a shareholder of these companies, whether they're European, whether they're North America, you want your company to do business there. If they can't,

then that's a problem. And I know you've sort of touched on it within a moment ago, but it sets China back How far? How long can we make some sort of view on whether this ha indeed, as we set this whole conversation up, given the US and its allies a leg up. Yeah, I mean that's that's a very difficult question to answer. I think most people would say, look, you cut them off from our technology, from the West technology, and we're talking years before they can even get to parity.

Maybe never. But the flip side of that is, though, is that you know, chip companies here are saying, actually, if you look at the fine print, what the Japanese are doing and what the Dutch are doing is nowhere near as severe as what we're doing. So unless we have this consensus, this similar level of action. Actually we're not really doing what we're supposed to be doing, so there's a bit of a debate there as to how effective these rules are going to be. All right, thanks

to Bloombergsy and King on the chip beat. Now coming up, Apple actually trying to reduce its dependence on China for its iPhone manufacturing. More on that next. Take a look at Apple shares really quickly and how we're trading. A lot of analysis of how Apple will fare politically US China, but also supply chain Reja. We're down almost two percent though in the session, in this risk off mode. This

is bloomberg time. Now for talking text, starting with Amazon and Microsoft, whose cloud services could face a full blown ANTITUSK probe over in the UK as after the country's Digital Regulator ofcom says it found evidence that the firms and maybe abusing their market power, making it basically hard for people to switch or use multiple cloud suppliers off cooms. It's particularly concerned about the US tech firms because of

their dominant position. Here's another big tech company under scrutiny. Meta. That's after Italy's Competition authority opened a probe against its over allegations it may have exploited its bargaining power more negotiating with the country's main artists rights organization. The watchdog also says look Meta may have withheld information needed to

carry out negotiations. And over to Asia, where Fox Con, the world's largest maker of Apple devices, increased revenue year on year and only by four percent last quarter, underscoring houphes or a recession is really crimping demand for iPhones and other consumer electronics, and the reported revenue of forty eight billion dollars while it's down steeply even from the previous three months when a COVID outbreak prompted protests and

its main facility in Central China disrupting iPhone production basically for weeks end. And we're going to dig in more. Yeah, So'scot and Apple. Are those two tech names re examining their electronic supply chain which is centered on China. Let's start deeper into all things Apple and how it's laying the foundation to make iPhones elsewhere, which was the topic of a Business Week piece today Bloomberg Business Weeks Josh E. Brustein here with more. There was a very public visit

by Tim Cook to China recently. What sources is telling us josh is that at the same time, executives are trying to move away from China. What's happening. Yeah. Absolutely. You see Cook and Apple doing a sort of delicate dance here where they're trying to reassure China, a very important partner, that everything is okay, while also trying to

make sure that they are less reliant on China. We saw the big disruptions late last year at the Fox kN plant and iPhone City, and they're building up capacity in other countries so that they are less vulnerable to geographic disruptions in the future. Joshua, Can you tell us a little bit about where, which countries where does the supply chain shift? Yeah? Absolutely so for iPhones, which is the majority of their production that is shifting primarily to India.

This has been happening for about five years, but it's really ramped up over the last year or so, and the next iPhone generation could be the first time we see the first batch of iPhones leaving both from China and India at the same time. For mac production, that's happening in Southeast Asia as well, Malaysia and also Vietnam, a little bit in Ireland, but less complex kind of put together. Yeah, exactly for some mac products that will happen in Ireland, but primarily the focus there is on

Southeast Asia. Josh, I guess the question goes to which products and what rationale. Right when the second wave of COVID hit mainland China, it became apparent that the higher end pro models, the production of them, was concentrated in Jung Joe. A lot of our reporting seems to suggest that this is political as well, in terms of what's going on between the US and China. Which is it? Yeah, I mean I think that there's two things going on

simultaneously right now. You do have just the inherent vulnerability of concentrating such an important production pacity in one geographic area. You know, if there's a disruption due to COVID and the only place shoemake these phones there's in one area and they're suffering from COVID, then you really run into a problem. But also it's really impossible to ignore the intention between the United States and China and all sorts

of areas. And I think Apple is looking to avoid some of that by having a fallback plan if something does happen. It's a great weed. Go get your business week, Joshua bursting, Well, thank you so much for it. This is a incredibly disruptive new technology. All of the leading AI labs know they're creating something dangerous, but none of them really want to stop it. Welcome back to new technology. I'm Canaine hiding and I'm d Lovelow in San Francisco.

The chat GPT revolution carrow could open the door to a four day week by providing a major productivity boost for many jobs. That's according to Nobel Prize winning labor economists Christopher Pissarides, who says the labor market can adapt quickly enough to AI backchatbots tampering down concerns that rapid advances in tech could bring mass job layoffs. And I don't know if you saw this one, but President Biden

tweeting about AI overnight. I was wondering, Carol, when the White House would weigh in on this, as often is the case, and here comes the split. We have the pro side, in fact, the Nobel Prize winning economists saying, look,

this could be really additive to our productivity. Yes, there are sub concerns and President Biden really highlighting them there, but we continue to daily discuss how much are we really thinking about the ethics involved, how much are we thinking about the negative consequences as well as the positive consequences?

And Professor parisides thoughts in line with what Goldman said last month, three hundred million global jobs at risk, but plus seven percent annual contribution to global GDP potentially from generative AI. So you know there's concern, but there's hope. So let's bring in Richard Socher for more. He's the CEO and founder of the AI search engine you dot com. He also served as the Chief Scientists a VP at Salesforce, and was the CEO and CTO of AI startup meta

Mind before that. You were not one of the signatories to the pause petition last week, but you operate a generative AI search engine. Are you one of those that thinks a pause is helpful or just adds to the noise? I don't think a pause is feasible. It's hard to tell people like, don't think about this, don't work on this abstract general purpose technology. I do think it is important for lawmakers to think about how to deal with

a changing job landscape. I do think it'll make sense for us to regulate this technology as it gets applied in specific areas such as military, healthcare, transportation, and so on. Regulation makes sense there, But it's kind of like trying to regulate the chip sets and say this chip is not allowed to make this kind of computation or compute dysfunction. It's just very hard to do that. Versus when you apply chips and put them into a weapon, there is

actual regulation of how that weapon should be used. And I'm not using weapons because I think this is weapons great technology. I think I'm just using that in that it's a general purpose technology. It's more like a hammer or the Internet, and the Internet you can share illegal and horror content, but we don't make the entire Internet illegal and say hey, how about we slow down the

Internet tide. Instead, we say no, if you'd share this particular kind of content like child pornography or like murder videos and things like that, like we make that illegal. And that makes a lot of sense. Which we're just looking at that exact tweet basically that you put out there saying regulated regular related in a thoughtful manner. Here, it's interesting you seem to be aligning in some ways with why I think of what's been being put out

by other professors. I'm thinking particularly of many Bender the stochastic parrots and report where she's saying, sometimes when you're putting too much thought around the intelligence of artificial intelligence, you're almost adding to the hype. Here. That's exactly right. I feel like there's a whole industry now what I call them anti hype hypers and by then saying, oh, wow,

this is so omnipotent, so dangerous, we have to regulate it. Honestly, it probably makes some people think, wow, well, then I really got to have like countries, certain organizations where values aren't really important to them. At the same time, I think we're antropomorphizing a lot the technology, thinking it has its own thoughts and things like that. It isn't terdably powerful. The impact on jobs is real, but it doesn't have a super intelligence that will have a mind of its own.

It really just it's the next word, because that's what you're asking it to do. Will it has now capability currently to say, Oh, I just don't want to predict next words anymore. I want to just have my own thoughts and do my own thing. It's interesting. Of course, there's also this narrative EDD that some that were signing the petition for a pause perhaps were just a bit behind the curve and the application of their own AI technology.

But and you've been playing with you dot Com in particular. Yeah, you know, I use chat GBT, I use barred by Google, Richard, I have been using you dot Com very similar products. And the question I put to you, because you actually seem to be taking a somewhat objective view on this, is is whether this is just sour greats from an industry trying to catch up with a clear leader in

open AI. I do think so. I do think some folks trying to slow it down while we say, oh, it'll be nice if recap sometime to catch up to this whole situation. We were actually at dot Com the first to instead of trying to regulate the technology or says or saying this is impossible to use for a search engine, just trying to make it better. For instance, they hallucinated a lot, and so now we added the capability of these lms to have citatients and to stick

closer to the sources that they find online. We launched it in December last year, and Open Eye and others like Being have copied that capability now and I think it makes the whole larger language model space better and more useful for search engine. Yes, Caroline JP Morgan out with that note this morning, right, calling Microsoft a clear early leader in the generative AI space. It's partnership with open Ai. Big names moved early here, didn't they. Yeah,

and Richard, you can speak to this. You've worked in big names, you worked at Salesforce, you now got your own startup. Is it right? It's Open Aye sucking all the oxygen out of the room when it shouldn't be. How much do we need to work to think of smaller players? And now are the bigger players really marching here? Yeah, it's a great question. You know Microsoft Pad has its monopoly days and use that monopoly power a lot in the past, and they're certainly applying that playbook now to

you know, an almost subsidiary of Microsoft. You know it's they own fifty percent of Opening Eye, and it is it can be tough. You know, we launched certain capabilities like LMS with citations, then Microsoft later on copied that feature. They're now trying to end all the little competition and search engines that they used to want to support in

their struggle against Google. Now they say, oh, it seems like we would be able to lose ourselves, So they increase the prices by ten or even fifty x, making it not feasible anymore to partner with them. So there's definitely that attempt for Microsoft to try to get back to this monopoly power. Interesting, and of course I'm sure Microsoft will go to for commonness or whether they feel that they're in an anti competitive competitive manner. But Richard, what do you do at you dot com to continue

to be relevant in the space, to continue to grow. Yeah, we've been very much ahead of everyone when we launched this larger language model chat search engine in December last year. The field moves so quickly. It didn't last very long. When we became the first to have multimodal outputs in these chat models. So if the aster chat model, oh, what's the stock price of salesforce? Instead of making up a bunch of numbers, which what most is what most of these models will do, we just show you a

stock taker. So the outputs kind of different modalities can be a table, can be a craph, can be an image, can be an interactive element. So we essentially introduced the idea of an app store to a search engine, and that allows the chat model to be a lot more

powerful in an actual replacement to Google. So we're trying to merge the best ideas of a traditional search engine with the chat bat like capabilities of summarize this whole website for me, write me an entire HTML website or longer piece of code, and all of these things, and we'll continue to innovate than some more exciting things are

on the pipeline. Well, continue to innovate. Richard, the Bloomberg Opinion Editorial Board have an opinion piece out today saying that an AI pause would be a disaster for innovation. You seem to agree with that argument. My question is what are you doing to innovate? How busy are you going out there trying to get new checks from your backers to continue the research, to continue the development. Yeah,

I do think it's just impossible to regulate. It's like saying, hey, these models need the Internet, so let's make Internet a little bit slower. Or these models need chip sets, how about we makeing chips a little bit slower so that we slow this all down because some of these chips would be used to do bad things. It's just not even feasible. Not every country would participate, and it's just it doesn't even make sense because the technology can be

used for so many good things. We've trained the same technology that you see for a textual chat in natural language English. We use that technology back in my salesforce stays to train on protein generation so we can find for cancer, we can find new cures for viruses and

things like that. This technology is so general purpose, it can do a lot of amazing things, and to say let's slow it down at the very basic player just doesn't make sense when you apply it to medicine and other areas yating that it needs to do this, Richard, Does U dot com survive in a world where Google's barred and Microsoft three bang are offering exactly the same thing?

Does the pucky plucky player survive? We think so. There have been multiple smaller search engines that are worth billion dollars already like that dock Go, and people still care about privacy. And to be honest, Google's barred and Maxwell's being have not yet caught up with everything that we do and I think we have a shot up. Great to have some time with you, great conversation, Richard Socio. We thank you dot Com CEO. We while coming up, we'll talk a little bit more about funding as Ed

was just getting to it. Why Stripe, one of the world's most valuable startups, is seeing a payment's volume slowdown. More on that and more in our VC roundup. That's next. First, let's get back to some of the banking concerns that are swirling today and shine a light on all of Warden Tech player First Republic because another two and a half percent as we once again worry about some of the deposits at these smaller lenders from New York and

San Francisco, the Suremberg. But when you look at how the economy is evolving, how the technology of the economy is evolving, or we're still seeing increasing demand for more data centers because of more Internet traffic, because of more sensors on car, because of generative AI. Right, so company is like in video, a more diverse folk company like a broad camp is a good position for a client

all right, Time for the VC roundup. Stripe says that growth in payments volumes slowed last year, even as it helped more large businesses and clients handle payments over the internet. The payments company says volume climb twenty six twenty twenty two, but that's compared with sixty percent growth in twenty twenty one, when Stripe and many of its rivals saw rapid growth as consumers did more shopping online during the pandemic. Over to Saudi Arabia's to You, a startup that provides a

range of services from ridehailing to food delivery. It's hired Moelis and Co. To help raise funds to fuel the super app's growth. Talks for the financing round at an early stage, and the target amount is still being firmed up. According to say Caroline. Let's talk about another key payments startup, Chipper Cash, the African cross border payments platform. It's not been immune from the banking crisis. In fact, the massive

layoffs hitting Silicon Valley this year. The company's co founder and CEO spoke with Newberg about where they go from here. We're not immune to the idea that even we've had to become a bit more capital efficient. I mentioned Alia, we had to take my belts in a couple of areas, because I think even as a business, we've also had to rethink and of asked my entire teams and everyone in the company to think about every single expense in the business, think about it again and deeply do we

need to spend money in that area? Where can we be more efficient? Do you see more cost cutting coming in the near future for Chipper, because I know you, like many other tech companies, you've had to lay off a number of a lot of your workforce. I mean,

do you see that continuing on for more months? Want unforesee additional layoffs with Chipper specifically, And to give some more context there, you know, we came out of a period where we hired over two hundred and fifty people in a space of you know, eighteen months, and we grew to almost five hundred people globally, and you know, including acquiring another company, and that rate of growth just

by function of how fast it's happening. Building some inefficiencies and so for us, part of making sure that we're being as officient as possible as meant revisiting every single aspect of the organization and seeing where can we be as efficient as possible, Chipper Cash, co founder and CEO, her Mam Sarah and Jogi. There some of the most iconic and beloved characters in the gaming universe are coming to a big screen near you. But if you live

in Japan, you're gonna have to wait. The Super Mario film premiering internationally today won't feature in Japanese theaters for another three weeks or so. So why do fans in the birthplace of Super Mario and the home base of its creating Nintendo have to wait? The straightforward answer is that Japan will be up, will be the toughest audience to please. Yes, the rest of the world has die hard fans, but no country Caroline has the same concentration

of Morrow followers than Japan does. Oh gotta know your audience, gray one. Meanwhile, let's talk about EVS a little bit. Kia today is unveiling It's all electric EV nine SUV. It's a flaction with the company's plan S strategy, basically to spearhead it's transition to EVS and too millibility solutions by twenty twenty five. Let's talk about all of it. Let's c centis Kia executive vice president and Coo and Steve. The EV nine, the suv, who is it wanting to

compete with? Right now? It isn't going to compete with anyone because it has a clear space at the tap of the suv market. So in the coming year, some other vehicles such a Chevy Blazer might be a competitor. But this is a full size three rowd suv, a six or seven passenger with a targeted three hundred mile range, and there is anything like that on the market right now. See, the biggest question for you, guys, I suppose is pricing. You know, lots of models coming online here in North America.

Everyone has their eyes set on Tesla, So how do you price that upcoming EV to make it competitive? Good questions. Well, Kia has added a lot of new vehicles to the line in the past few years, and tell your eye as single handedly changed the brand and we've been attracting newer customers, younger, better educated, much wealthier that are purchasing a car well into the sixty dollar range, and that's paved the way for EV line. So I would say, well,

we're not ready to pricing. It will be priced beginning with the high end of telling the right and then up the premier packages and features. So, Steve, we've got to put you on the spot about the IRA, then the Inflation Reduction Act. Do you design the vehicle and priced as a vehicle so that it is caught within the parameters of that legislation. No, you have to design for the market and you don't make long long term

decisions based on a short term taxation policies. And the IRA is a disruptive type of legislation where auto companies who are moving along based on just insider rules and the government changed them all of a sudden. As an example, we had already announced our hundred order of metaplans in Georgia who are building a battery factor the end of vehicle assymbol factor as well, and that was before IRA was announced. So we're moving for the plans for electrification

based on what the market demands. Let's talk about the market and in fair in fact, let's talk about competition a little bit more. Steve, we actually went to our audience and ask them about Tesla in particular and perhaps whether in this current environment it's losing market share or whether it's an impact of slowing economy that perhaps is curtailing the demand for Tesla's at the moment or in fact, thirty nine percent in the audience thought that demand for

Tesla's evs are still full on. Do you think they are or do you think that your gaming market share from the likes of Tesla. Yeah, well, there's two things that are happening. You have everyone else getting in the game right now, So the number of choices for electric vehicles is expanding, the acceptance of electric vehicles for variety

is expanding. So you may be kind of questing they're difficult to concourse from, but we're attracting customers from all brands now, and these are people that are considering their first EAVY or the first ev sub in the case of six or so. The market's growing, so not everyone's coming to Teslas. Steve, what's the secret source for Kia? What is it you think you have an advantage in when you're going up not just against Tesla but the usoms who are bringing all these models online. What are

you going to do to win? Well, we're a bit of a disruptive brand. Kia is thirty years old and we started out with small internal combustion cars who are relatively newer to larger su needs until your hearts maybe only four years on the market, So perhaps our secret sauces are innovative technology, are willingness to take risks, and also our customer focus and development products that are fought on for customers. Right, Steve Center of Kia Motives, thank

you for your time. That Caroline, there was a time where Tesla was the only game in town. But you're not. Are learning this week that's not true anymore. Twenty thousand orders in the first quarter going to the acts of GM, ten thousand going to Forward Kia. I mean everywhere you look, there's hybrids, there's Toyota. We haven't discussed yet. A lot more to come in the numbers. Difficult economic outlook for

the rest of this year. Well that does it for this edition of Bloomberg Technology, though, character and you do not want to forget to check out our podcast. You can find it on the terminal. You can go online on apcoholes, what if I on iHeart Whether you like to consume your audio from New York from San Francisco. Wish you wonderful rest of the day. This is a roombag